Internet in Egypt
[1] Although Internet access was soon quickly restored following Mubarak's order that year, government censorship and surveillance later increased years later following the overthrow in 2013 of Mohamed Morsi, leading the American NGO Freedom House to downgrade Egypt's Internet freedom rating from "partly free" in 2011 to "not free" in 2015, which the country has retained in subsequent reports, including the most recent in 2023.
The agreement is the second phase of a 2002 initiative and is part of the MCIT's strategy of increasing computer use throughout Egypt, focusing on socio-economically disadvantaged communities.
The service was offered in select central offices in big cities such as Cairo and Alexandria and gradually spread to cover more governorates of Egypt.
[citation needed] The service improved dramatically between 2007 and late 2009 due to the heavy investment of all parties involved in the provision of Internet infrastructure.
The local National Telecom Authority issued a decision for all ISPs to offer a free-of-charge month to all clients to compensate for the reduced quality of service during the outage.
As a result, bloggers and netizens critical of the Army have been harassed, threatened, and sometimes arrested.The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), which has been leading the country since February 2011, has not only perpetuated Hosni Mubarak's ways of controlling information but has strengthened them.
For example, Egypt's Ministry of Interior ordered Internet café managers and owners to record their customers' names and ID numbers in February.
[30] However, in May 2009, a Cairo court ruled that the Egyptian government must ban access to pornographic websites because they are deemed offensive to religion and society's values.
[31] The suit was filed by a lawyer who pointed out an Egyptian man and his wife who were sentenced to prison for starting a swingers club via the Internet as an example of "the dangers posed by such offensive Web sites."
[32] As a result, there were rumors that it might be blocked, especially after a group of activists managed to recruit supporters using Facebook for the 2008 Egyptian general strike protesting against rising food prices and President Hosni Mubarak's government.
On 10 April, a military court sentenced Nabil to three years in prison, in what Human Rights Watch called a serious setback to freedom of expression in post-Mubarak Egypt.
[37] American company Narus, a subsidiary of Boeing Corporation, sold the Mubarak government surveillance equipment that helped identify dissidents during the 2011 revolution.
[41] The authorities responsible achieved this by shutting down the country's official Domain Name System, in an attempt to stop mobilization for anti-government protests.
[44] The shutdown happened within the space of a few tens of minutes, not instantaneously, which was interpreted as companies receiving phone calls one at a time, ordering them to shut down access, rather than an automated system taking all providers down at once.
FDN provided the service as a matter of principle to "contribute to the freedom of expression of the Egyptian people and allow them to keep a connection with the rest of the world.
I also call upon the Egyptian government to reverse the actions they've taken to interfere with access to the Internet, cellphone service, and social networks that do so much to connect people in the 21st century.
Awareness of the interference did not gain traction among the broader public until December 2016, when users suddenly discovered that Signal, the messaging and voice calling application supported by Open Whisper Systems' encryption protocol, had stopped working in Egypt.
Indications that the Egyptian government has made attempts to acquire technology that would allow it greater surveillance of communication networks have surfaced several times.
The most notable revelation came from a July 2015 data breach when an unknown individual hacked the computer system of a Milan-based information technology company HackingTeam.
Around 400 gigabytes of data – including emails, contracts, bills, and budgets involving the company and Egyptian security and intelligence authorities – were accessible to the public.
[citation needed] In concert with other evidence, the leaked documents show that Egyptian authorities were attempting to acquire technology that would allow them to collect information on specific users of interest through directed surveillance.
The first problem that companies and specialists faced that indicated Egyptian security agencies may be targeting the entire network's infrastructure arose in August 2016.
In response to a client's inquiry, which was obtained by Mada Masr, DigitalOcean wrote that the interrupted service was not the result of a technical error but had been deliberately caused: Since you're physically in Egypt, there's not much we would be able to do to prevent them from messing with your traffic...
[58] The report indicates that the Tor anonymity network appeared to be interfered with in Egypt, though HTTPS connections to DigitalOcean's Frankfurt data center were throttled.
[58] Freedom House has reported that other VPN and proxy services intended to circumvent censorship, including TunnelBear, CyberGhost, Hotspot Shield, TigerVPN, and ZenVPN have been blocked as well.
However, their counterinsurgency effectiveness is limited because of insurgents' widespread usage of workarounds such as walkie-talkies and portable Broadband Global Area Network terminals.
Reasons for these detentions and prosecutions include spreading fake news, inciting violence, insulting the president, and "contempt of religion," and sentences have been as severe as five years in prison.
6 April Movement founder and activist Esraa Abdel Fattah had personal photos, emails, and recordings of phone calls posted on social media without her consent in 2017, for example.
[66] In the week after the extremely small 20—21 September 2019 protests, Egyptian authorities blocked, restricted, or temporarily disrupted online communication services, such as BBC News, WhatsApp, Signal.
[68] Social media sites like Facebook allowed liberal, minority, and religious groups to make communication networks and mobilize protests, as can be seen with the Egyptian Revolution of 2011.
